


Ditching Salem

by MorteLise



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Road Trips, Unrequited Love, honestly just the worst road trip, morally bankrupt people barely getting along, not actually redemption fic, v4 divergent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-02-06 11:12:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12816273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorteLise/pseuds/MorteLise
Summary: When Salem's treatment of Cinder causes her health to decline rather than improve, Emerald and Mercury decide it's time to cut their losses and bail. Their plan might be half-baked and they might be desperate, but nothing is going to stand between them and their freedom.Even if that plan involves begging for help from a cold, self-serving, morally ambiguous bandit from Mercury's past. Oh, and kidnapping an unwitting Cinder before she gets herself killed.Yeah, maybe they've got their work cut out for them after all.





	1. Don't Panic But We Might Be Screwed

**Author's Note:**

> This diverges somewhere in early volume 4. Hopefully in a way that makes sense.

Between her lifetime of petty crime, penniless and abandoned childhood, and brief but shining role in helping orchestrate the downfall of a prestigious academy responsible for training the people tasked with protecting civilization itself, thereby undermining one kingdom and disrupting the delicate power balance of the other three, Emerald Sustrai had an intimate and well-defined knowledge of the many and varying degrees of screwed a person could be. It was a system she had first developed mostly to apply to herself, to gauge when to bail out of a tight spot before things went fatal, but under Cinder’s leadership she had finally, gleefully been able to apply it to everyone else instead.

Of course, then everyone else hit peak levels of screwed with the fall of Beacon, Cinder nearly got snuffed out by some weird non sequitur power courtesy of Vale’s resident sunshine child Ruby freaking Rose of all people just as they’d finally recovered the rest of the Fall Maiden’s power, and now there Emerald was, stuck in the middle of ungodly nowhere at the mercy of her crippled boss’s terrifying bloodthirsty peers and demonic Grimm-crafting superior with only said crippled boss and an under-motivated, sociopathic, dad-murdering assassin even remotely concerned about her continued existence. Needless to say, she was back to using her trusty system on herself.

Ha. Karma. Funny how the positive kind never seemed to find her.

Emerald’s screwed levels, which had been oscillating somewhere between ‘shit I’m in way over my head here’ and ‘without divine intervention there’s a decent chance this could be how I die’ ever since she and Mercury had first been introduced to Salem’s inner circle trying to find help for Cinder, finally took a turn for the truly bail-worthy worst when Cinder’s health went from cringe-worthy to alarming one otherwise unremarkable Monday evening.

Well, probably evening, given the overall lack of conventional sunlight in Salem’s territory. And only probably Monday for that matter; there was a chance Emerald had started losing track of the days without a light cycle. And unremarkable in the sense that Grimm-spawning pools and bizarre crystalline architecture and literally everything about whatever the fuck Salem was had somehow become baseline normal over the past few months.

Things had looked good in the beginning—well, no, Cinder had looked horrifyingly bad when Emerald and Mercury dragged her out of the wreckage of Beacon and fled eastward, but even if Doctor Watts was a massive prick he was admittedly a damn good doctor. Some scarring and a missing eye (Watts assured them Cinder’s voice would return in time while making sure to repeatedly mention that it was regrettable for everyone else that it would but wouldn’t it be nice if you’d show some gratitude, Cinder, I know how much you love hearing yourself talk) seemed like a small price to pay compared to how desperately Cinder had been clinging to life after Ruby’s…meltdown. So of course it turned out the worst of the damage the silver-eyed something-or-other had done was Aura-based rather than physical, which they discovered when Cinder tried using her Maiden powers for the first time since Beacon and ended up doubled over on the floor in agony. But whatever else Salem was (seriously, what  _ was _ she), she was understanding about Cinder’s predicament, and so the creepy Grimm-based healing sessions had begun.

Even those had looked promising in the beginning—not that Emerald had started out paying the closest of attention when there was still everything else about the stronghold to get used to—Cinder had borne the painful-sounding treatment with quiet stoicism and claimed she could feel her Aura growing stronger with each session. And at first it had; within a few days she could summon a small, sputtering flame to her hand again, gleaming and gold, but when she tried anything beyond that—something stronger, something longer lasting—that same ethereal silver from the night of Beacon’s fall started edging in out of nowhere until it had consumed the gold and sent Cinder back into what her broken voice could pass for a screaming fit. From there it devolved into a vicious cycle, where Cinder’s sessions got more and more difficult for her to bear, where her desperation drove her to push her powers harder, and where Ruby Rose’s stupid plague spread the damage even further than before.

There was a time not so long ago that Emerald would have thought Cinder capable of anything. But here and now, trapped in some living nightmare and barely sure of the day or the time or sometimes even the planet, staring down in horror as Cinder’s latest attempt left her convulsing on the floor without enough breath to even try screaming, it seemed like another life.

A glance to Emerald’s left told her Mercury shared her concerns, and under any other circumstances she would have welcomed seeing the obnoxious levels of smug wiped off his face. Right now it just confirmed that there was literally no upside to this situation.

Salem didn’t look particularly thrilled either, but rather than express it with explosive rage like Torchwick (huh, whatever happened to that guy anyway?) or stone-faced disdain like Cinder, she showed something weirdly close to maternal disappointment. Which was still ominous, because anyone who looked like that didn’t have to try very hard to be terrifying.

“Cinder,” Salem said gently, kneeling down beside her in a pool of black fabric, “after all you’ve accomplished it’d be a shame to see you broken by something so trivial.”

Cinder took a deep, shuddering breath, the air rattling wetly through her lungs as she shoved herself to her hands and knees, nodding furiously in lieu of using the voice that had finally deserted her completely. She forced herself up into a kneel, weight settled fully on her legs but her back ramrod straight, and tilted her head back to meet Salem’s burning red gaze with a steady, if feverishly unfocused, one of her own. She nodded again, slow and deliberate.

Salem graced her with a slight, warm smile, tilting up Cinder’s chin with a paper white hand. “My dear child, is it any wonder fire is your favored element?” She stood, turning to Emerald and Mercury, who had almost learned not to flinch at this point. Cinder collapsed back into a motionless heap the moment Salem’s eyes were off her. “Help her up, this session is done.”

In an act that had regrettably become habit, Emerald and Mercury rushed to Cinder’s side, each slinging an arm over a shoulder and lifting her nearly limp body to something resembling standing. Salem had already turned away, dismissing them. Which, thankfully, meant they only had to endure her presence for the amount of time it took to hustle Cinder out of the room.

“Wait.”

Or not. Crap.

All three of them turned to her, although how Cinder could manage to hold her head up was beyond Emerald. Salem’s expression had turned calculating. “For all your effort, I fear I haven’t given you enough incentive, Cinder. Perhaps my gentle hand has limited your progress. I have matters to attend to these next few days that require my presence elsewhere. So I’ll give you this ultimatum—take the time while I’m away to practice at your own pace. If you have nothing to show for it when I return, we may have to rethink our strategy.” The smile she gave this time held no warmth but an alarming amount of promise. “You’re dismissed.”

Cinder finally lost consciousness by the time they had made it halfway down the hall back to her rooms, sparing her the sight of Doctor Watts’ insufferable smirk as he passed them on the way to his own meeting with Salem and leaving Mercury and Emerald free to well and truly freak the fuck out after they’d closed the doors and deposited her on her bed.

“We have to get out of here,” Mercury hissed, dragging a hand through his hair.

“Oh really, Mercury,” Emerald snapped at a furious whisper as she paced the floor. “Wow, thanks for the input, I never would have guessed that.”

Emerald could feel Mercury glaring at her, so she upped her pace to avoid giving him the satisfaction of acknowledgement. “I don’t see you coming up with any ideas. You’re the master thief here, shouldn’t you be able to think up an exit strategy?”

Emerald choked down a bark of derisive laughter. “Well, gee, sorry, this,” she gestured wildly around the obsidian room and particularly toward the window overlooking Salem’s barren wasteland territory, “is a little outside my comfort zone. I’m gonna need a few days to sleep on it.” She whirled on him, pointing an accusatory finger. “What are you contributing to this escape plan?”

Which was either a great question or a complete misstep considering he lit up like he had an actual answer.

“Well, if a certain someone can do her job and figure our way out of here, I might have an idea of who could lend us a hand after—”

A chill ran down Emerald’s spine—generally the sign that one of those creepy jellyfish seer Grimm was drifting down its sentry path out in the hallway—and derailed the conversation entirely as both she and Mercury went as still and silent as the grave.

The few times they’d talked about this in the past hadn’t gotten them killed just yet, but that was only because they were beneath notice. It still wasn’t a great excuse to stop exercising caution.

“I won’t die here,” Mercury said after they were certain it was gone.

“We might not have a choice,” said Emerald.

Mercury managed something close to his signature smirk, in a sad, pale imitation kind of way. “We have till Cinder croaks. Which might not be long, but it’s a planning window.”

Emerald couldn’t help but glance at Cinder at that, nested in opulent furs and hopefully unconscious enough to escape the constant state of pain Salem’s treatment and Ruby’s curse had put her in.

“We can’t just leave her here.”

Mercury snorted. “Why not? She got us into this mess. And in any case, look at her. On the off chance the effort of escaping doesn’t kill her outright, she’s basically dead weight.”

Emerald exhaled shakily, trying not to sound too angry with the only ally she had left. “She’s the only reason we’re still alive.”

Mercury looked unmoved. “And if she dies, they’ll have no reason to keep us around. If she recovers and finds out we’ve been thinking about bailing, she’ll execute us herself. Just because she dug this grave doesn’t mean we have to lie in it with her.”

A sharp inhale came from the bed as Cinder woke with a start, which would’ve given Emerald a heart attack even a few days ago considering their topic of conversation, but lately conscious didn’t necessarily mean lucid for Cinder after a session. Emerald grabbed a trashcan from the bathroom (for all that the architecture was alien it was weird how normal the amenities were) and hurried it over to the bed as Mercury rolled his eyes well out of Cinder’s line of sight.

Cinder glanced blearily around the room before focusing on Emerald, lips parting reflexively before she remembered her lack of voice. She pushed herself up to a tentative sit, brow raised and eye darting from Emerald, to the door, to the bed and back.

It was too bad they couldn’t weasel their way out of this with a rousing game of charades; Emerald had gotten pretty good at that. “You haven’t been out long. Less than ten minutes.”

Cinder frowned anyway, shoving back her hair impatiently and withdrawing into herself in what was no doubt a review of her latest session, which lasted about as long as her pain-free grace period (so about thirty seconds) before her face went white and she lunged for the trashcan, retching. Mercury shot Emerald a pointed look, which Emerald ignored as she went back to the bathroom to fetch a glass of water and a wet cloth.

“Drink,” she said, passing Cinder the water after she finally stopped heaving. Emerald wiped the bile from Cinder’s dark hair with the cloth as Cinder pressed the glass to her lips with shaking hands and took a few tentative swallows. “You good?” Emerald asked after Cinder passed the empty glass back and shoved her hand away, taking the cloth for herself.

Cinder overlooked the informality (probably because she was in no state to scold anyway) and nodded. Emerald shoved the trashcan into Mercury’s chest. “Do something already, would you?”

Mercury made a face as he took the no-longer-empty can, because he was actually five years old. “Sure, stick me with the crap job.”

“You stand there like a useless sadsack, you get stuck with the crap job,” Emerald shot back.

“Well excuse me for not being a kiss-ass and treating our goddamn boss like an invalid—”

Cinder slammed a fist into the wall and glared them both into silence. Mercury grumbled under his breath as he moped off to clean out the can in the sink. Emerald stood at awkward attention, trying not to fiddle with the empty glass she belatedly wished she’d passed off to him as well.

Pen and paper had become staples in all corners of the room after Cinder had lost her voice in a more absolute (if still hopefully temporary) capacity, and she fetched some from beneath her pillow and began writing furiously. Either she had a lot of thoughts on her own performance earlier or she’d just reached some sort of breaking point with Emerald and Mercury’s deteriorating mental fortitude, because she was still writing when a knock came at the door a few minutes later. Emerald was grateful for the excuse to do anything besides stand there hovering as Mercury splashed around and probably used the running water to cover his constant bitching and Cinder continued her possible magnum opus, up until she opened the door and saw who it was.

Doctor Watts flashed her an unbelievably self-satisfied smirk beneath his mustache. “Don’t mind me, I’m just here to check on our favorite patient.” He leaned past her to where Cinder had frozen on the bed, pen poised above the page and eye glaring daggers. “Well, Cinder? How are we doing today?”

Watts—who was by far the most frequent non-Grimmlike face they saw thanks to Cinder’s current condition—had the exact brand of smug confidence that Emerald found unbearable (like Mercury cranked up to eleven, come to think of it) but she wasn’t suicidal enough to give him any grief, standing aside as he sauntered into the room and up to Cinder. Cinder’s glare deepened as she put her pen aside and pointedly folded up her paper. Watts’ smirk widened in response.

“Haven’t quite gotten that voice back yet, I see,” he said. “I’d say ‘lay off the screaming’ but I’m afraid the problem may go a little deeper than that at this point. To think, our lady subjects you to the most extreme healing treatment she has at her disposal and somehow you manage to use it to worsen your condition. Only you could be so talented.” He chuckled. “With all this backsliding, I’d worry about the favor you won at Beacon wearing thin.”

Cinder’s expression remained impassive even as the blood drained from her face. Emerald suddenly realized how quiet it was as Watts’ words hung in the air and saw that Mercury had stepped back into the room to join them, his expression equally blank. Somewhere in the back of her mind, her screwed levels rocketed up to somewhere very near maximum. She forced air back into her lungs.

“So were you actually going to do that check up, or…?” Emerald asked with as much nonchalance as she could fake.

Watts glanced at her as though he’d only just realized she was there. “Ah, no, that was a poor choice of words on my part, I admit. In fact Salem cancelled all further medical exams. Something about seeing how Cinder progressed left to her own devices.” He flashed them a grin that was all teeth. “I will, however, be your only company while our mistress is away, so I thought I’d take a moment to see how you were doing before returning to my work. It’s been…enlightening.” He patted a stunned Cinder on the head and strolled back out the door. “I’d make it a productive next few days if I were you!”

Everything in Emerald screamed that the only way to salvage this situation was to literally invent time travel.

Sadly that was a state of mind she’d been in more than once before, so she managed to snap back into business mode not long after the door clicked shut, sitting down at Cinder’s desk to think on that exit strategy as Mercury went back to cleaning duty and Cinder back to her writing more frantic than ever.

Escape would be difficult, obviously. Getting in had been easy since they’d been welcomed with open arms after Beacon, but frankly there was a lot Emerald didn’t know about the fortress even without the ‘beyond comprehension’ angle in play. As far as layout went, she and Mercury were only allowed in a limited number of rooms, and in any case the Grimm sentries were generally on patrol. Even Doctor Watts, who was presumably at least human, was a mostly unknown factor—Cinder seemed to reluctantly defer to him most of the time but it was hard to tell whether that was a general superiority thing, an age thing, or a product of what Cinder had been reduced to lately. Never mind the big old question mark as to his Semblance and combat abilities.

And then there was Cinder herself—Mercury wasn’t wrong when he said they had a snowball’s chance in Vacuo as far as convincing her to betray Salem was concerned, but if they left her she was as good as dead. And yeah, between her current health and her total opposition to what they were planning she’d be a detriment at best and a fatal liability at worst, but Cinder was—

After all she’d done for them—

After all she’d done for  _ Emerald _ —

They weren’t leaving Cinder.

So Salem was at least out of the picture but her Grimm sure weren’t, Watts would probably be on high alert if for no other reason than he seemed to consider Cinder’s decline quality entertainment, the majority of the building and the rest of Salem’s territory for that matter were total unknowns, and on top of it all they had to kidnap their dying boss. Great.

Ironically, it left Emerald in the sort of bind she’d usually ask Cinder to help her brainstorm her way out of. Which would have lead to nothing more than a hard slap in the face if Cinder personally thought the problem easy enough to solve without her guidance; but overall she was a sucker for a good thought exercise. And infiltration was Cinder’s forte—it was why they’d been chosen for the opening strike at the Vytal festival, after all. She knew the terrain, knew the guards (both human and not), could improvise like a champion—ugh, wouldn’t it be nice to get at least some kind of advice from their less-illustrious-than-usual leader.

But sadly even with her failing health and occasional lapse into delirium Cinder remained anything but an idiot, so that was out of the question. She’d know treason for what it was in an instant. Even if Emerald tried disguising it as a hypothetical scenario. Or a thought exercise. Or an order from…Salem…

Emerald realized she’d shot up in her seat about two seconds before she realized Cinder and Mercury (freshly emerged from the bathroom) were staring at her for doing so. “We—need food,” she blurted out after a moment. “Because of the session and the long day and it’s probably dinnertime and anyway, Cinder, you have to keep your strength up—I am going to go get food.”

She didn’t quite scamper out the door like an idiot, but it was a near thing.

It was the worst epiphany to have, both overall and according to Emerald’s nearly nonexistent conscience. Cinder had been through enough, between the various physical ailments rushing her to death’s door and the psychological pressure Salem had put on her for failing to get over those physical ailments, but Cinder was their best bet for a halfway functional escape plan and the worse off she was the easier it’d be for Emerald to fool her into giving them one. Even if it meant hypnotizing Cinder into thinking Salem wanted her to come up with a way to escape her own fortress. For…some reason. Yeah, that part needed some ironing out.

So it sucked, but it was also Emerald’s only idea so far that could possibly almost work. But that didn’t mean she wanted to formulate the best way to dupe Cinder right in front of her, so off to fetch food she went.

The fortress had something amounting to a kitchen, which remained well-stocked thanks to what Emerald wanted to believe was either the product of Salem’s various cohorts going on food runs while they were off doing her bidding or the work of the most dedicated deliveryman in all of Remnant. The more likely explanation was that Salem had her servants—human and inhuman alike—retrieve supplies from the countless decimated villages and caravans that littered Anima and hadn’t been scavenged by bandits first, but if Emerald wanted to amuse herself with the mental image of Hazel browsing a grocery store or Vale’s one shopkeeper in a trucker hat rolling up to Salem’s front door with a refrigerated truck, then she was going to do it, damnit.

Cooking was not a skill Emerald had ever thought worth bothering with when theft came so easily to her, but it was nice to have something to do with her hands as she puzzled out what to do about Cinder. She set a pot of water on the stove and dumped a variety of vegetables that looked like they might go together on the counter along with a slab of meat of uncertain and probably uncomfortable origin, and set to hacking away haphazardly.

It was a remarkably straightforward plan, now that she had it—Cinder didn’t quite worship Salem with the wide-eyed zealousness Tyrian showed, but she wouldn’t question orders, no matter how  strange. Of course, that meant selling to Cinder that it  _ was _ an order from Salem, but Emerald been to enough council meetings to fake Salem’s speech decently and the desperate were easy to fool. And Cinder had to be just as desperate as Emerald and Mercury at this point. Probably more so.

Okay, so it was risky and more than a little lazy of Emerald to dump the planning on Cinder, especially in her current condition, but the fact remained that Cinder had most of the intel they needed to get out anyway. Emerald might even have something to contribute after all once she had the relevant information to apply her skills to.

“You need a hand there?”

Emerald started in spite of herself, cursing as a piece of the carrot she’d been chopping went flying halfway across the room. Mercury raised an amused eyebrow from the doorway.

Annoyingly he was the only person she could have felt relieved to have interrupt her, but the subtle tension to his posture told her that now was not the time to continue her train of thought. They didn’t so much have a signal for when outside ears might be listening as they did a general rabbit-in-snare vibe, and Mercury was giving that off in spades.

Stupid small talk it was, then. At least until the coast was clear of…whatever it needed to be clear of.

There were so many fabulous options.

“I have a knife, you know,” she muttered, waving it in his general direction. As well as her weapons strapped to her waist because she wasn’t suicidal, but the knife was available for brandishing.

“You sure do,” Mercury replied with almost his usual level of indifference. He nodded toward the food-strewn counter. “And no idea how to use it, it looks like.”

Emerald glanced down at the sad mass of chopped meat and vegetables and refused to admit he had a point. “I’m sorry, were you here to badger me or judge me? Cause right now you’re doing a lot of both.”

Mercury shrugged, heading over to inspect the boiling pot on the stove and get an up close look at the general ingredient massacre. “I think she’s having some kind of meltdown, she kicked me out of the room for breathing too loud. Then again she said not to come back unless I brought dinner, so maybe she’s just hungry.” He prodded at a ragged chunk of what was probably cabbage. “What were you even trying to make, anyway?”

“Soup. Stew? The thing where you stick everything in a pot and let the boiling water do the work.”

Mercury’s judgmentally superior smirk made its triumphant return from wherever it’d been hiding out since they left Beacon. Emerald had somehow forgotten just how much she hated it. “And then Cinder tries to strangle us with her bed sheets when it takes three hours for us to get back?”

Emerald blinked and looked from the pot to Mercury and back. “Three—it can _ not _ take three hours. The water’s boiling hot! You throw a pot of boiling water at a guy and he’s not gonna say ‘oh wait, I think I need three hours to really feel this.’ Third degree burns are at least, what, meat done rare? The food is cooked when it reaches a point where no one will get food poisoning and die.”

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t technically be cooked in the near future, I’m just saying it wouldn’t be good. Doesn’t look like you even have seasoning. If you don’t give the flavors time to set into the water, you’re just left with this crappy tasteless mess. So I guess if you wanna be sure Cinder gives you all the credit for making it, go right ahead with that.”

Emerald tried not to pout and failed. “Fine, what’s your great idea?”

Mercury slammed a pan down next to the pot on the stove. “Stir fry. Way faster.” He grabbed a bottle of olive oil. “There’s a reason boiling oil’s a siege staple and boiling water’s not.” He glanced down at the food pile again and started separating the chopped vegetables. “And most of these don’t even cook at the same speed. Look, just go get some garlic, ginger, and soy sauce, would you? And maybe some tea so we can do something with all that water you wasted.”

The question ‘why the fuck can you cook?’ rose to the tip of Emerald’s tongue, but in the end her confusion was very, very eclipsed by her annoyance. “Amazing. We finally find something you’d be useful at here and you ruin it by being an insufferable prick.”

“That’s one more thing than you’ve been doing.”

The small talk would always be weird, especially since it meant slipping back into the covers they’d used at Beacon under nearly inverted circumstances, but at least it was nothing they weren’t used to. Cinder had stressed discretion, at least while out in the open on the campus proper, and frankly given Emerald and Mercury’s usual dynamic all they’d had to do to go unnoticed was remember to limit their subject matter while sniping. Same shit, different day.

And different stakes—whereas blending into the cheery, candy-coated stupidity of the Vytal festival still meant flying under the radar of some dangerous people, at least it was  _ blending _ . It was stuffing themselves into society’s cookie cutter mold for five minute stretches to look like they bought into the shared delusion of safety, justice, and equality like all the other idiot wannabe-heroes. In Salem’s territory they had to sell their nonexistent commitment to mediocrity to a select group of people who were, without exception, more dangerous, psychotic, and cynical than they could ever hope to be. It almost made Emerald miss spending quality time with team RWBY.

Actually, it definitely made her miss it. Wow. She’d hit rock bottom.

The tea was brewing and Mercury’s stir fry underway when three seer Grimm stunned them into paralysis, one drifting past the kitchen at the languid pace of a sentry while the other two went flitting by before splitting into separate hallways. An alarming amount of tension dropped from Mercury’s shoulders after they were gone. Emerald swore she felt her heart restarting.

“So what was that about?” Emerald muttered above the sizzling oil.

Mercury glanced back out toward the door and sighed. “Passed Salem out in the hall. She was paying a visit to Watts.”

“She does that?” Thank God there was precedent, that’d make selling a last minute visit to Cinder a lot easier.

“Guess so. Sounds like things are going fine in Haven and Hazel’s still negotiating with the White Fang, but nobody’s heard back from Tyrian and it’s got them on edge.”

Well, they sent the guy after the Spring Maiden, and rumor had it she wasn’t the newly-minted pushover Fall had been. Even if he was a raving psychotic, it might have taken him time—hang on, Salem had switched his assignment to—

Wait.

No.

Emerald’s mouth might have been gaping like a fish. Her only hope was that Mercury was too preoccupied with cooking to notice. “How could that nutjob be having problems with Ruby freaking Rose?”

Mercury shrugged and tossed more vegetables into the pan. “How did we?”

“Did the eye thing transform her into a human frag grenade or something? I mean they said Cinder was some sort of mythical weakness that they really should’ve warned us about sooner but this is just getting ridiculous.”

“She does have our favorite drunk Huntsman with a knack for bad timing as her uncle. Or maybe Tyrian’s less crazy than he looks and ditched.”

“You think  _ Tyrian  _ ditched? Okay, now you’re projecting.” She exhaled slowly, getting her mind back on track. “Speaking of.”

Mercury glanced back at the door again and nodded. “Yeah. You got anything yet?”

He’d probably hate the idea, considering how dead set he’d been against dragging Cinder along. “Let me know what you’ve got for stage two first, if you’re so proud of it.”

Mercury rolled his eyes, clearly aware of her deflection, but in the end was more eager to boast about his  _ brilliant _ idea than call out Emerald. “My old man had this contact for his work, someone he used when the mark was too heavily secured or guarded. She was part of the reason he had the reputation he did—thanks to her, he could take out targets no one else could reach.” He frowned. “Payment might be a little tricky, I never did hear what he had to give her to get her to work with him, but I have a way to contact her and if we can pay the fee she can probably get us as far away from here as possible in record time.”

Emerald raised a skeptical eyebrow. “What makes her a better option than, say, an airship?”

Mercury scowled, which might’ve had some sort of impact if he weren’t adding spices to the pan at the same time. “Other than the time it’d probably take us to even find an airship out here, her method involves portals. We’d be here and gone in seconds.”

Something clicked in Emerald’s brain. “Port—oh, is this that cultist you recommended to Cinder a while back?”

“Tribe leader.”

“Tribe, cult, whatever. You mentioned Grimm masks, wanton acts of destruction, and that she runs around calling herself ‘Nevermore,’ kinda makes it hard to tell the difference. She’d probably get along famously with the White Fang.”

Mercury snorted. “Nev doesn’t get along with anyone.”

Great, that sounded promising. “So why would she help us? She already turned us down once.”

Which had been hilarious, actually—Mercury had brought up Nevermore and her bandit tribe as another potential ally around the time Adam Taurus had turned down their offer, but they’d been so preoccupied with planning out the ambush on Amber that Cinder had outsourced the message delivery to Torchwick. Which had gone about as well as could have been expected.

Apparently Mercury had found it pretty funny too, because he started snickering. “Admit it, seeing Neo cry like that was almost worth the rejection.”

Emerald’s mouth may have started twitching slightly. “Not as much as Torchwick’s bad timing. After all the bitching he did, it was nice to see Cinder put the fear of Fall into him for the first time.”

“Can’t argue with that.” And then it was time for sauce. “Anyway, she’s got some sort of convoluted honor code, and as far as I can tell it means I’ll have better luck bringing up our shared history and showing her some actual respect than a couple of small-time nobodies did trying to threaten her into playing ball. And I’d feel safer going to someone who’s already turned down Salem’s job offer than with some civilian who’s never heard of her. At least we know Nev hates what we’re dealing with as much as we do.”

There were a million ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ with that plan, but it was about as solid as what Emerald had to offer. “Okay. So we haggle with your cultist if we get out of here.”

Mercury snapped off the flame on the stove and began looking for plates. “So how are we getting out of here?” he asked, rummaging around in the cabinets.

No use putting it off any further. “We’re asking Cinder,” Emerald said, and began mentally racing through her argument while she braced herself for Mercury’s response.

Mostly he froze, staring at her incredulously with one hand still in the cabinet. “What.”

Emerald inhaled shakily, pulse thrumming with nerves and excitement. “Okay, hear me out here,” she said, putting up her hands in placation. “Cinder’s got more know-how about this place and everything in it than we could ever hope to even if we’d had years of time. And she’s never once failed to get us out of a bind before, one way or another. Beacon aside.”

“Right,” Mercury said slowly, still eyeing her like she’d lost her mind. “But I think the whole treason thing might make her more homicidal and less helpful.”

“Only if she realizes we’re the ones asking.” Emerald tapped a finger to her temple. “If she thinks Salem’s the one asking…”

Mercury’s eyes widened in understanding, prompting him back into motion as he finally retrieved some plates. “So what angle are you gonna use?”

Emerald began loading the tea and some cups onto a serving tray. “I’m not sure, I’m thinking…thought exercise? The Maiden powers might be Cinder’s biggest selling point, but it was her cunning that got her those powers to begin with. She’d buy it if Salem wanted her to make sure her mind was still sharp by the time her body recovered, right?”

Mercury hummed in agreement, dumping the food into a serving bowl. “What if you pitted her against Watts somehow? That’d motivate her.”

“Yes! She’d love that. So would I, actually. Guy needs to be knocked down a few pegs.”

Mercury arranged his own tray and shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.” He picked up the tray and nudged Emerald on his way out. “You screw up and I’m blaming it all on you, though.”

Emerald rolled her eyes. “Gee. Thanks.”

Fuck you too, Merc.

Their less-than-half-baked plan still put Emerald in higher spirits, up until they opened the door to Cinder’s room and found her sprawled out on the floor. Emerald’s heart leapt into her throat as she set her tray down and hurried to Cinder’s side, checking her pulse.

It was an unnecessary gesture—Cinder’s strained breathing and spasms of pain were proof of life enough, but she definitely wasn’t doing well. The pronounced tremor in her hands gave Emerald an idea of what had put her in such a state, at least.

“What were you thinking?” she hissed, trying to steady Cinder’s hands with her own. “You know it’s too soon to try again.”

Cinder yanked her hands back and curled into a ball. Mercury sighed from somewhere above them.

“You said not to come back without dinner,” he said, setting a bowl down on the floor. “So. Dinner.”

A sliver of gold peered out from the Cinder-ball to eye the bowl. She didn’t move.

“You have to keep up your strength if you’re going to get better,” Emerald said quietly.

Nothing.

So now Emerald was playing nursemaid to her adult employer while said employer made a valiant attempt to die faster and pitched a fit on the floor like a toddler. It was great to know there were still even lower lows for her to reach.

Okay, tough love time. Even if attempting tough love on a remotely able-bodied Cinder would have been an instant death wish.

“I really hope you’re not going to kick my ass for this later,” Emerald said to the ball, like that hypothetical ‘later’ was coming any time soon, “but you know you’re throwing a tantrum right now, right? In front of people and everything. Even if those people are just me and Merc.”

“And we respect you,” Mercury chimed in. “Mostly. Little hard to do that right now.”

The sliver of gold blinked slowly, followed by a long, weary exhale. Cinder uncurled herself and shuffled back to lean against the bed, dragging the bowl of food with her. She picked at it with all the zeal of someone who had recently had something close to a seizure, but at least it was something. Emerald and Mercury took that as their cue to join in for dinner.

It turned out Mercury actually was a pretty good cook.

Unfair.

Somehow during dinner Mercury managed to telepathically communicate to Emerald that if she didn’t get her shit together and dupe Cinder into starting their escape plan that night, Cinder would probably work herself to death within the next twelve hours and Mercury would toss Emerald out the nearest window to the Grimm out of spite. 

But that wasn’t really that impressive, since Emerald had already figured most of that out and the last part was Mercury’s default threat lately.

The next hour passed excruciatingly slowly, mostly consisting of Emerald and Mercury repeatedly attempting to get Cinder to get some rest while she brushed them off. The best they were able to do was extract a dubiously trustworthy promise that she’d stop trying to use her Maiden powers for the night, and even managing that much was so emotionally exhausting that both of them tossed in the towel and announced they were going to sleep without her.

Emerald drafted scenario after scenario behind her closed eyelids as she feigned sleep, working and reworking it until she felt it matched Salem’s syntax and body language, until the request sounded almost reasonable, until Cinder’s hypothetical interaction with ‘Salem’ would carry out in a way that wouldn’t give away the delusion. She heard Cinder’s pen still quietly scratching away and hoped that Mercury had opted to actually sleep—she’d have a hard enough time selling this without accounting for his reactions if he were conscious. She ended up putting it off for what she estimated was another half hour, just to be sure.

It wasn’t nerves, it was caution, damnit.

Emerald rolled over in a way she hoped still made her seem passably unconscious until she was facing the sound of Cinder’s scratching pen, listened a moment to make sure Cinder was still hard at work, and cracked an eye open. Cinder was seated at her desk, dark head bowed as she scribbled frantically away. A stack of written pages was piling up beneath the desk lamp.

Shifting to see what Mercury was up to would probably be too suspicious, so Emerald just hoped he’d at least have the sense to fake sleep until this was over with. She took a deep breath and focused on Cinder.

Showtime.

She took care of herself first, implanting the firm suggestion that she was still asleep in Cinder’s mind. Sure, Cinder wasn’t even facing her at the moment, but the last thing Emerald needed was to screw this up over something as stupid as not accounting for peripheral vision.

Step two: there’s a knock at the door.

Cinder’s head snapped up immediately. She set her pen down and glanced around the room (and that was why covering her own ass was always Emerald’s step one) before going to open the door.

Step three: construct a passable Salem waiting for her on the other side.

From the tension and deference in Cinder’s posture, it looked like it’d worked at first glance, at least. Cinder swallowed hard and bowed her head, glancing nervously towards the pen and paper she’d left on her desk. Emerald had Salem hold up a hand.

“No, Cinder. I want you to listen.” Not like Emerald could read from this angle, anyway.

Cinder exhaled sharply and nodded.

“I’ll be leaving shortly, but my last conversation with Doctor Watts made me realize your assignment needs an addendum.”

Cinder’s shoulders tensed at the name. And possibly at the announcement, too.

“The good doctor believes your decline is irreversible. He’s asked me why I would waste my time and resources trying to heal you when I would be better off finding your replacement.” Emerald curled Salem’s mouth into a tight, humorless smile. “I was forced to have some...strong words with him regarding his questioning of my judgment, so it will not be happening again. But I’m perturbed it happened at all.”

Emerald had Salem press a hand to her mouth and eye Cinder appraisingly. “Cinder, need I remind you why you were chosen to assume the position of Fall Maiden?”

Cinder shook her head.

“Then perhaps you should remind Doctor Watts. Before you continue your training, I’d like you to complete an exercise.”

Cinder perked up, back straightening as her anxious tension eased away.

“While it is essential that you master your new abilities, I fear our recent focus on them has caused your old skills go to waste. Watts looks at you and sees only how inexperienced you are as a Maiden; forgetting so quickly that you were able to attain those abilities and bring ruin to Beacon without Fall’s full power at your disposal.”

Salem was so wordy. Why was Salem so wordy. Emerald felt a headache begin to form in the back of her skull even as she forced her construct to keep talking.

“It must be providence that your greatest detractor will also serve as your caretaker these next few days. I want you to use tomorrow to prove him wrong. Your specialty has always been infiltration--use it to slip away under Doctor Watts’ watchful eye and make your way to the nearest village. Retrieve a token to prove you made the journey successfully. And if you are able to make your way back with Watts none the wiser and present the proof to me upon my return, he will have no choice but to acknowledge that you earned your place in my counsel long before you became a Maiden.”

That sounded reasonable, right? It was hard to tell over her growing migraine.

Cinder was motionless, probably processing her mission, but she stayed unresponsive so long that Emerald started getting nervous.

“Nod if you understand, Cinder.”

Cinder nodded, sharp and confident.

“Good. Then I’ll take my leave. I look forward to seeing what you’ve accomplished when I return.”

Cinder hovered in the doorway for an annoyingly long time, staring after Salem’s retreating form. Emerald was just starting to wonder whether she was bleeding out of any orifices from the strain when Cinder finally shut the door and sat back down on her desk. Emerald bit down on her lip to silence a relieved sigh as she finally dropped the illusion.

She should’ve stayed awake to see whether Cinder well and truly bought it. That would have been smart and thorough and safe.

But it was seriously not happening.

No, instead Emerald dropped off to sleep so suddenly it might’ve meant she’d fainted.


	2. When You're Bluffing a Bad Hand, It Helps to Have Cards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ohhh my goodness, thank you for your patience everyone, in a shocking twist here at last is chapter two.

Mercury woke Emerald the next morning by prodding her in the side with his boot. She swatted at him, and nearly bruised her hand on his stupid metal leg.

Cinder’s commanding finger snap had a lot more success in rousing her.

Cinder was looking leagues better than she had the night before, even though the stack of papers in her hands meant she couldn’t have gotten much sleep. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, bright-eyed and with more color in her face than she’d had in days.

Mercury was visibly relaxed, too, so Emerald guessed he’d already been briefed. “Cinder got a new mission last night,” he said, eyes gleaming. “Salem wants us to practice stealth, see if we can make it to the nearest town and back without Watts noticing.”

“Huh,” Emerald said, carefully neutral and also not completely awake.

Cinder thrust her stack of papers at Emerald and nodded purposefully.

“She’s already put a plan together, too,” Mercury added. “Spent all night on it.” He raised a knowing eyebrow. “Looks workable.”

Cinder shot him a displeased look at the faint praise.

Cinder’s paperwork was everything Emerald could have hoped for—it detailed Watts’s routine, the routes and schedule of the seer Grimm, had extensive if crudely drawn blueprints for the building’s architecture—and the plan itself was simple but effective.

Somehow the sight of it made Emerald’s heart swell and sink at the same time. Of course Cinder hadn’t needed her help. She was still Cinder.

And she was only going along with it because Emerald had messed around with her brain.

“So we’re trying today?” Emerald asked, and Cinder nodded.

“Watts already thinks she’s at death’s door, and it’ll give us more time to get back,” Mercury added.

She wondered how long they’d spent discussing it before she’d woken up.

Emerald read the plan over again, more carefully this time. In her peripheral vision, she saw Cinder nod to Mercury. He nodded back.

“While _someone_ plays catch up after sleeping in, I’ll go make breakfast.” He smirked at Emerald. “So it actually turns out edible.”

Dick.

As he left, Cinder nodded towards the papers and gestured for her to speak.

Emerald took a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess it makes sense,” she said. “But did we want to run through it first…?”

Erring on the side of caution used to be Cinder’s thing before Beacon, but now she shook her head, still infected with the manic need to prove herself that had helped put her in this state to begin with. She scrawled something in jagged, urgent letters on a new sheet of paper.

_Nothing can alert Watts._

Emerald swallowed and nodded. “I know, but we want it to go smoothly,” she said.

Cinder’s mouth thinned. She wrote something else down.

_So get it right the first time._

Emerald winced. “Right.”

Cinder slid one last message to her, jaw set with anticipatory tension.

_Let me know when you have the plan memorized. We can’t leave behind any evidence._

And with that, she shredded her messages and burned them to ash with the slightest sparks from her fingertips.

That much she could still safely handle, at least.

Mercury came back with a once again annoyingly well-prepared breakfast by the time the last ember of their soon-to-be-executed plan winked out. “Take it that means we’re good to go after eating?” he said, sweeping aside the ash pile with a foot as he set down his tray.

Cinder nodded, tearing into her food with a gusto Emerald had been missing for a while. Emerald raised an eyebrow at Mercury as she glanced pointedly at the sight.

Mercury just rolled his eyes. Ah. Right. Jackass was still in the ‘Cinder’s not worth it’ camp.

Well, he could rot there if that was how he wanted to be.

And anyway, they still needed her to pull this off.

For now, Emerald was just thrilled to see Cinder give her all at something that wasn’t actively killing her.

It’d been a while.

Stage one meant a trip down to the training room. Back when everyone’s hopes for Cinder had been a lot higher, Salem would pit her against low-level Grimm for practice, but that hadn’t been an option lately when taking Cinder’s health into account, and wasn’t an option at all without Salem around.

(Sure, if they really wanted to bring in some Grimm, all Emerald and Mercury had to do was take a trip outside, shout for a little bit and then book it back into the fortress, but while that would be effective in luring Grimm, it would also be a really stupid idea.)

Cinder straightened up, set her stance wider, and beckoned at Mercury to begin.

Stage one was also Emerald’s least favorite stage.

They had to make it look good—like Cinder was still giving her all with the Maiden training—and between the recorded footage and Watts’ expert eye, that meant that Mercury wasn’t holding back.

Cinder did better in the mornings, especially this specific one since she hadn’t bothered with her side practice bullshit and was actually starting fresh. She wasn’t giving much back in the spar—hadn’t since Salem had told her the only weapon she could use in training was her firepower—but she did at least manage to deflect or avoid everything he threw at her.

It wasn’t anywhere near her best, but Emerald’s breath still caught to watch Cinder dodge and whirl, as fluid and intangible as her flames. Emerald had almost forgotten how the fight was supposed to end until Cinder held up an arm, hand golden with gathering power, until it abruptly wasn’t and she collapsed to the ground in a rictus of pain.

Some of it was an act. But Emerald doubted all of it was.

None of Emerald’s concern was faked as she rushed to Cinder’s side.

“Cinder!”

It was actual paperback romance cover, the way they looked; Emerald falling to her knees to gather Cinder up in her arms and curl protectively around her. It was the kind of overblown manufactured cliché Emerald had executed for cons before, and every time she wondered how anyone could fall for it.

Most were just gullible, she guessed. With Watts they were more counting on his colossal ego.

The code was one hand squeeze for ‘I’m good, let’s do this’ and two for ‘oh fuck, I’m really dying.’ Cinder squeezed her hand once, gently, before falling limp in her arms. Emerald breathed a sigh of relief into Cinder’s hair.

And cue the waterworks.

Those were completely faked. Crocodile tears were a long-time weapon in Emerald’s arsenal.

“Mercury, help me,” she sobbed, and was annoyed by how uninvested he looked even through her tears.

To be fair, that was probably how he’d act if this hadn’t been staged, too.

Mercury took Cinder from her, lifting her easily and spinning on his heel to take her back to her room. Cinder stayed admirably unresponsive throughout. But for all Emerald knew, she might’ve just passed out for real.

“I’ll grab some medical supplies and meet you back at the room,” Emerald said, then darted off to do just that.

One of Watts’s many surveillance cameras was stationed in the supply room by the pharmaceuticals, probably so he could keep track of how much Cinder was discreetly patching herself up instead of asking him for help during her recovery. That or he was some kind of depraved voyeur. Emerald was willing to buy either one.

They weren’t supposed to know it was there but of course Cinder did, and with some carefully planned hysteria as she ransacked the medical cabinet Emerald was able to successfully block the camera. Chances were Watts would notice and possibly even realize it was deliberate, but either he would step away from his video feed to fix it, or that was one camera less to worry about. Either way, blocking this specific camera was more likely to make them look desperate to cover up Cinder’s condition than looking to escape.

Emerald grabbed some extra supplies for their journey, figuring with their luck they’d end up needing them regardless of whether Mercury actually pulled through with their fast-track to freedom, and then scampered back to the room.

Cinder was already up and about, which was the actual greatest sight Emerald could have come back to. Thankfully the personal rooms were surveillance-free, seer sentry patrol aside—Emerald doubted Watts had any respect for their privacy, but Salem did at least pretend to give a damn.

There was a lump beneath the covers on the bed behind her. The good old pillow decoy was meant less as a legitimate ruse and more as a ‘fuck you’ to Watts if he got that far in his investigation, though.

(And since their great escape meant he eventually would get that far in his investigation, that ‘fuck you’ was going to pay off for her. Yay, Cinder. Not that that little bit of payoff would stop her from trying to kill them when she figured out what was going on, but at least it was something.)

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Emerald blurted out as she jammed the extra medical supplies into their one travel bag (to be carried by Mercury for strategic reasons, but Emerald had pack mule snark _planned_ ), tearing open the supplies she’d set aside for Cinder’s ‘injuries’ so they looked adequately used.

Cinder actually glared at her and did an entire fucking back flip.

Okay, then. Hopefully she held on to that energy.

Cinder sat down on the bed right after, taking out a notepad like she’d only done it to cross some ‘t’s and dot some ‘i’s as far as planning went, but Emerald saw it for the ruse it was. She thought about asking Cinder if she was sure again after that suicidally proud display, but had a feeling Cinder would use her remaining energy to burn her to a crisp if she did.

Cinder took a deep breath and slammed down a cup of tea she hadn’t finished earlier, then gestured to Emerald and Mercury to get on with it already. Emerald crumpled up the ‘used’ bandages in her hands and flashed Mercury a tight smile in spite of herself.

“Don’t screw this up,” she said sweetly, and he snorted.

“I’m not the one who has to fake it for Watts,” he replied, slinging their travel bag over his shoulder as he left.

Ugh, true.

Emerald stuffed the bandages in her pockets and set off down to Watts’s room for stage two, ignoring the way her heart hammered in her chest.

Okay, it wasn’t like she didn’t like the _idea_ of pulling one over on Watts, but it was a lot more fun in concept than in execution. But even if he fell high on the danger scale, she had a feeling his total lack of respect for her would screw him over in the end.

That was usually how it went for Emerald. The gullible and desperate were easier marks, sure, but the smart ones always had an over-inflated opinion of themselves.

There were limited exceptions, of course, which was where her nerves were coming from. But Watts really didn’t give the impression that he’d fall into that category.

Doctor Watts opened his door before she could knock, probably as some sort of omniscience play. Oooh, he knew her every move, why wouldn’t he when he probably had half a dozen cameras stationed outside his room alone?

(He had just the one, actually. Which Emerald had ‘accidentally’ nudged out of position by a few careful degrees, so of course he’d noticed her.)

“Can I help you with something?” he drawled with barely concealed impatience, closing the door behind him so he could glare down at her in the hallway.

(Nearly closed, anyway—he’d _thought_ he’d swung it shut that extra half inch and heard the door snap shut with its oh-so-handy automatic lock, but gosh, brains could be funny that way sometimes. And wasn’t it a damn shame that the camera was focusing in on them and their conversation instead of what was going on by the entrance of that door now?)

Her heart was still hammering anyway. Whatever, it’d help sell it.

She took a shuddering breath and clasped her hands behind her straightened back. “I’m here on Cinder’s behalf,” she said.

Well. Duh.

Watts agreed, shooting her a look that screamed ‘no shit.’ “I had assumed as much,” he said dryly. “What does the little drama queen want now?”

His attention away from the door while she snuck in under the cover of Emerald’s Semblance was what ‘the little drama queen’ wanted. And while Emerald had managed to get her in, she still needed a reason to keep Watts out until Cinder was finished.

Emerald shrugged, trying and failing to look nonchalant. “She’s eager to start her independent training. I know you’re not helping with her medical care anymore, but we were hoping for some pointers, or something? Maybe just what needs the most work, or what she should avoid straining…”

Watts chuckled derisively. “Is that so?” He stroked his chin, and Emerald had the brief, wild notion that he would actually start twirling his mustache. “Yes, of course. I would say that my advice would be not to bother. Or actually do; with any luck she’ll exhaust herself to death before Salem returns to enact whatever countermeasures she has in place.” He sneered at the stunned expression on her face. “Oh, come now, I doubt even you’re delusional enough not to notice how self-destructive her training has become.”

No shit, asshole.

“That’s why we’re reworking our strategy,” Emerald stammered, letting her nerves bleed further into her voice. “Maybe we just need to look at this from a different angle while the pressure’s off. She already did a lot better this morning—”

“Ah yes, would you be referring to the session that ended with your jackbooted friend carrying her limp body back to her quarters?” Emerald let her face fall and he smirked. “Tell me, is she even conscious yet?”

Conscious enough to be robbing you blind, prick.

Emerald dialed back her crocodile tears setting to a two: slight lip wobble and eyes welling up, but no actual waterworks. “She’s doing better,” she said, keeping her voice a forced steady. “If you just came and saw for yourself—”

Watts ‘tsk’ed as he cottoned on to what Emerald had hoped he’d think was her real plan. Which would’ve been an even worse plan than the real one, but she was glad at least Watts thought planning something that stupid was credible. “While you accompanied me, I’m sure. So that a trained physician could vouch for Cinder’s supposed improvement.” He nodded towards the bandages just barely poking out of her pocket. “Well, child, I do appreciate how truly desperate you’ve gotten, but your transparency is the very definition of pathetic.”

The door moved subtly, and it took everything Emerald had not to sigh in relief as she activated her Semblance again so Cinder could sneak back out of the room. Talk about well-timed.

Emerald lifted her chin in obviously faked bravado. “She’ll do it. Just you watch.”

Watts hummed dismissively. “Perhaps I will, from a safely objective distance. But in the meantime I believe there’s a camera that needs fixing in the supply room. But I suppose you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”He smirked again and took off down the hallway.

God, she hoped Salem kicked his ass when she realized he’d let them go missing.

Emerald waited in the hallway looking suitably bereft before slinking back in the direction of Cinder’s room, trying her damnedest to smother her grin.

Cinder’s hand shot out from an unfamiliar corridor to seize her by the arm, and she almost had a heart attack. It was the left hand, too, still bulky with bandages from all the creepy Grimm-based healing treatments.

Cinder’s eye was bright, her triumphant smirk so wide it was very nearly a smile. She held up what looked like the lovechild of an old-fashioned key and a data-card: dark, windingly-crafted metal shot through with jagged red lines leading back to a bright red stone set in the center of Salem’s emblem etched into bow. The thing had a pulsing glow that reminded Emerald uncomfortably of the nightmare queen herself.

Cinder had stressed the importance of Creepy Key in her plans; it was, in a nutshell, their ticket out of there. Salem had been practical enough to craft a Salem-substitute for the more… _special_ rooms and functions of the fortress while the boss lady herself was away—one Cinder had free access to in the past, but had been adamantly denied in the present to prevent her from making even more terrible decisions.

Which was something Cinder would’ve been willing to honor if Emerald weren’t the worst enabler ever.

But she was, so on they went to stage three.

Cinder dragged her down a long, winding path through a whole lot of hallways Emerald had never been down before, stopping and starting at strange, intermittent periods of time probably for sentry-related reasons.

Mercury was waiting for them at the end of it, lounging by a dark, veiny door that matched up a little too well to Creepy Key for Emerald’s taste.

Cinder raised her eyebrow in a ‘well?’ gesture, finally dropping Emerald’s hand. Mercury nodded.

“Set up the looped camera feed on the way here,” he said, shouldering their travel bag again from where he’d left it resting on the floor. “Should buy us a few hours. Just be quick about souvenirs when we get into town.” He stepped aside with a snidely affected flourish. “After you.”

Cinder sucked in a breath, handling the key with a gingery caution that made her look at least ten years younger. Her hand hovered in the air, but she seemed reluctant to take the final step.

Probably because of who the key belonged to.

Emerald could infer what was going on in Cinder’s brain almost like she were thinking it herself—Salem had never given Cinder permission to take the key.

(Because Emerald hadn’t known about its existence until Cinder had laid it out in her plan.)

But Salem _had_ ordered her to take a trip into town, and presumably the key was their only way of getting there. So after a moment, Cinder took another breath and touched the key to the door.

The door had no handle or even a keyhole—in fact its only claim to ‘door’ had been its door-shaped design differentiating it from the rest of the wall—but as the key touched the door, the door answered the key’s pulsing glow and…opened.

It didn’t open like a door so much as it did like a flower, veins rippling and pulsing as the surface almost seemed to melt, liquid obsidian sloughing back into the wall, until there was a hole where the door had been.

Cinder stepped through, pocketing the key again as she did.

Emerald and Mercury exchanged a nervous glance before doing the same.

The room they entered matched the door and key pretty damn well. Salem was a master of coordination. Room might’ve been generous, actually—it was more of a chamber, all surfaces of the cramped space crafted a stark and terrible reflective black. Spartan was an understatement, too: there was nothing in the room, their only available light source the light shining in from the hall.

And then the door closed behind them, plunging them into darkness.

“It supposed to do that?” Mercury asked, falling short of his intended bravado.

And without a light source, it wasn't like they’d know if Cinder answered.

Cinder’s glass heels clacked across the floor, the sound reverberating in the small room, but Emerald preferred it to listening to her own now over-loud breathing. And then suddenly there was a light source again, albeit a small one—the key.

Illuminated in the dim, endlessly reflected light, Cinder ran a gloved hand down several walls before she found what she needed. The key slotted into an actual keyhole this time. She turned the key.

And then the real show started.

The gem pulsed once, brighter for all the annoyingly reflective surfaces in the room, and then it pulsed again, steady like a beating heart as the vibrant red poured out of it into the keyhole, slithering along the wall. The obsidian next to the keyhole peeled away like the entrance had, but rather than leading to a new room, the hole began to bleed that same red, cascading downward until the black wall was fully a pulsating, deep red.

It—hummed, like a living thing.

And Cinder fucking gestured them towards it.

“This is our way out?” Emerald asked faintly.

It looked more like it would eat them. Or maybe spit them back out as Grimm.

Rather than confirm or deny Cinder just gestured again, this time with considerably less patience.

Well, shit.

Emerald glanced at Mercury, who just raised his eyebrows in an unimpressed ‘after you.’

Right. What did she have to lose at this point, anyway?

(Her life, damn it, why else would they be doing this?)

She stepped through the portal.

It was a little like falling. And a little like being unmade. And it _screamed,_  the way Cinder’s flames had at her height, shrill and dissonant and undying, and time was not a thing, and maybe it really was going to repurpose Emerald into a Grimm, if it ever stopped—

And then it did.

Emerald’s ears were ringing and there was copper in her mouth as she dropped to her knees, heaving. But she at least managed to keep it down, unlike Mercury, who vomited right onto the grass when he showed up behind her. Sadly she felt too terrible to even consider gloating.

Cinder was fine.

As fine as Cinder could be, anyway—but she stared at them both with open disdain, dug one of their travel cloaks out of Mercury’s bag while he was retching, and took off without them.

“Please tell me—” Emerald began as soon as Cinder was out of earshot and her stomach wasn’t threatening to expel everything, but Mercury was already talking before she could finish the question.

“Nev’s portals are nothing like that,” he said quickly, scrubbing bile from his mouth and rummaging around in the pack for their two remaining cloaks.

Emerald shrugged hers on gratefully, and suddenly realized she recognized where they’d landed.

It was the rendezvous point they’d first met Salem’s inner circle at, so many months ago—a heavily wooded area about an hour out from the nearest village. She didn’t remember the trip to the fortress being quite that unpleasant, but maybe things ran more smoothly with Salem at the helm.

They’d done it. They were out.

Emerald blinked away tears of relief as she kept an eye on Cinder’s diminishing figure. “Told you we needed her to pull this off,” she said.

Mercury stood and shrugged. “Yeah. And now we have.”

Great, this again.

Emerald brushed by him to follow Cinder without bothering to give him a reply.

“Sure, leave the guy with the supply pack and the exit strategy behind,” Mercury muttered, but he was trotting at her side by the time she caught up to Cinder.

They had one swiftly dispatched Grimm incident on their way to town, which was enough to rile up Emerald’s nerves again. Thankfully it was also enough to tire out Cinder, who didn’t even bother objecting when Emerald and Mercury suggested she take a quick rest at the town’s only inn (which, as far as the innkeeper was concerned, had admitted only one person who didn’t match any of their descriptions).

 _Wake me up in half an hour_ , Cinder scribbled down the notepad she’d brought with her, and then pretty much passed out on the bed.

Emerald and Mercury had a staring contest over her unconscious body.

“Let’s just go, we can contact Nev the next town over,” Mercury said.

“More time means more witnesses, and more opportunity for Watts to figure out that we’re gone,” Emerald pointed out. “Call her here, Cinder won’t hear you. If we can broker passage for two, we can broker it for three—”

“And what if it spooks her?” Mercury snapped. “One foot in the grave or not, it’s not like Cinder wanted to do this willingly. Last thing we need is for her to try to take out Nev in the middle of our sales pitch—”

Emerald snorted and waved a hand at the limp figure on the bed. “Yeah, Cinder looks like such a threat right now. You’re wasting time we don’t have here, Mercury.”

Mercury fell into a cold, alarmingly thoughtful silence. “Okay,” he said finally. “Fine. I’ll call her. But when you’re outvoted two to one, you’re gonna have some choices to make, Emerald.”

Emerald’s stomach dropped.

“Yeah,” she said numbly. “Fine. Make the call.”

Mercury glanced at the unconscious Cinder, then sat down the room’s desk chair and took out a pocketknife, of all things. He took a breath and closed his eyes, then opened them again to give Emerald an uneasy look. “I can make the call, but I can’t guarantee she’s gonna answer. She’s flighty on a good day and she might still be pissed about the Torchwick thing.”

Emerald threw her hands up in the air instead of shouting ‘are you fucking kidding me’ the way she wanted. Less risk of waking Cinder. “Well what do you know,” she hissed. “A big talker who can’t deliver. God, Merc, we made it this far, just do it. What do we have to lose?”

Mercury grimaced in a way that suggested that Nevermore’s help might come with some fine print that he hadn’t mentioned earlier, but he closed his eyes again and took another breath.

He sliced his hand open with the pocketknife, then closed the fist on the pooling blood and let his Aura flare gently, just once, before he let it close the wound.

Emerald’s eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, that’s not cult-like at all.”

Mercury opened his eyes again, flexing his hand. “Her Semblance is all about bonds,” he said. “Usually just meaning the portal thing, but with enough focus and practice you can send something down the line. Pain works best, kind of like a distress signal. She’s great at picking those up when she actually gives a crap.”

“Which isn’t often?”

“Not really.” He settled back in the chair. “Now we wait. I’d give her up to an hour before you get mad at me.”

Nevermore took twenty minutes.

The air by the inn window bled red in a way that was a little too similar to Salem’s portal for comfort, and hovered there.

Emerald glanced at Mercury. “Does that mean she wants us to go through?”

He frowned. “Don’t know. She likes controlling the meeting, but she’s pretty set on keeping her tribe out of harm’s way. Give it a minute. We’d insult her more by just rushing in.”

“So help me if that thing closes while we’re waiting—”

A masked woman stepped through the portal. Nevermore knew how to make an impression, that was for sure.

She stalked out like she was expecting an ambush, everything about her stance wary as she emerged. The full-length black coat she wore was deceptively slimming on an obviously curvy and very fit figure, one dark gloved hand resting on the hilt of an unnecessarily long blade in a simple leather sheath. Her mask was also surprisingly understated—a flat, featureless white oval with two eye slits behind which red eyes gleamed—but the volume of her ragged, unbound black hair more than made up the difference.

Mercury looked equally floored. “Hey, Nev,” he said, his tone a forced casual. “Not your usual look.”

Nevermore cocked her head to the side, birdlike as her namesake. The portal closed behind her.

“What a brilliant observation, baby Black,” she said, clipped and cold. “It’s almost like I’m doing everything in my power not to be associated with you.” She relaxed a little, hand leaving her sword hilt as she crossed her arms. “I warned you not to get mixed up in this. What do you want?”

Mercury shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. The nickname could’ve factored in there though—Emerald gleefully filed it away for later use. “We want out. As out as you can get us, for whatever you want us to pay.”

Emerald nodded silently, entirely willing to swallow her pride if it meant Mercury could talk them out of this.

Nevermore scoffed, rendering that acquiescence moot. “Like I said, I warned you not to get mixed up in this,” she said, shaking her head. “Damn well made it clear I didn’t intend to get mixed up in it myself, either. So if you expect me to stick my neck out bailing your ungrateful ass out of it—” And then she paused, focusing on where Cinder had started stirring awake on the bed.

Emerald’s heart leapt into her throat. Mercury cursed under his breath.

Her Semblance would've been useful here, but that required more time to focus than Emerald had, since pretty much everyone just up and tried to kill each other.

Nevermore made the first move, glowing red blade flashing out (and glowing red just looked to be the trend around here, didn’t it) as Cinder shot out of bed, aiming to tackle the masked woman with her right hand wreathed in flame. And then the inevitable happened, the silver flaring up and turning Cinder’s lunge into a sudden collapse to the ground. Nevermore paused at this development, then leisurely lowered her blade right by Cinder’s neck.

Like a concerned idiot with no survival instincts, Emerald pointed her weapons at Nevermore in response.

Nevermore sighed, looking completely unthreatened by Emerald’s display. “Mercury, explain,” she said flatly.

Mercury, who had reached a new level of uselessness by just standing there as everything went down, glanced at her uneasily and shrugged. “She’s an unwitting tagalong, we just needed her to get out. Emerald over there tricked her into thinking our boss wanted us to sneak away for a few hours. She’s not willing, but she’s too weak to be much of a threat.”

Cinder went very still at his words. Emerald tried not to feel too ashamed.

Cinder had to find out sometime.

“She’s dying,” Emerald blurted out, and Mercury actually rolled his eyes at that.

“Which is why we needed to _leave_ —”

“Which is why we need to get her help,” Emerald snapped, lowering her weapons as she addressed Nevermore directly. “She’s been the one leading us, she’s more useful to you alive than dead,” she pleaded. “Anything we have to trade—information, resources, skills—Cinder has ten times over—”

“How did you get away?” Nevermore interrupted, tilting Cinder’s chin up with the tip of her sword. Cinder glared at her.

Emerald and Mercury exchanged a glance.

Emerald tried to look anywhere but at Cinder’s face. “I…” she began slowly, “we waited until...our boss...was away and then I let her think we’d been ordered to sneak away for a training exercise. The person left in charge should have no idea we’re gone yet.”

“So she thought Salem wanted you to do this,” said Nevermore.

“Well yeah,” Emerald began, and realized as she did that Nevermore had referred to Salem by name. “Wait, how did you know—”

Nevermore cursed under her breath, tore open another portal, and left.

Emerald and Mercury stood there in stunned silence.

“Fuck,” said Mercury.

Seconded.

Cinder tried to make a break for it, because why wouldn’t she, and at least tackling her to the ground kept their minds off how completely screwed they were for a second.

Cinder fought like an enraged cat—all claws and teeth—but her attempted homicide on Nevermore had already taken most of the fight out of her. After a few minutes of fruitless thrashing, she gritted her teeth and went limp, taking a deep, calming breath before settling down and sitting back.

They backed away from her, ready to make a move if she tried again, but instead Cinder rummaged around for a pen and paper.

 _So now what?_ she asked with a cold, snide smile.

That was a good question.

Mercury shouldered the bag again. “You don’t have anything to lose by helping us; Salem’s gonna think we turned traitor as a team when she finds out we’re missing.”

Cinder just shrugged, suddenly nonchalant.

That was ominous.

“This is a chance for a new start,” Emerald tried. “Staying there was killing you.”

Cinder just looked at her. Calm. Calculating. Disconnected.

Waiting.

Emerald’s stomach sank. What was she waiting for?

(What had Nevermore run for?)

She licked her suddenly dry lips. “Merc, maybe we should—” she began, when the air bled red again.

The upper half of Nevermore’s body leaned out, beckoning an impatient hand. “In. Now. Bring her,” she said, jabbing a finger at Cinder.

What the fuck.

Desperation and closing window be damned, Emerald balked at taking the plunge. Everything in her screamed not to—Nevermore’s flightiness, the clipped order, the part where Nevermore had never spelled out whether this meant she was helping them, the fact that she’d met the lady less than five minutes ago and even Mercury didn’t trust her—it was all too shady even with her lack of options.

But then Mercury took advantage of her hesitation to grab a still-exhausted Cinder and drag her through the portal as he leapt in himself, and well, fuck it, now there was no choice at all.

Not like Emerald had much to lose anyway.

At the very least Mercury hadn’t lied to her when he said Nevermore’s portals were way less of a trip than Salem’s.

Emerald staggered through, guard up and unsure of what to expect, and was faced with the underwhelming sight of more middle-of-nowhere wilderness.

And the less underwhelming sight of Nevermore’s foot planted solidly on a once-again prone Cinder’s chest, Mercury still standing uselessly to the side.

Emerald cocked a gun, and a sigh reverberated through Nevermore’s mask.

“What are you, her guard dog? It’d be a waste to kill her now,” Nevermore said. “I’m just making sure she stops trying to kill me.”

Emerald glared at Mercury, her weapon still drawn. “Why are you letting this happen,” she hissed, and both his eyebrows shot up in confused incredulity.

“We already committed treason, you know that right?” he said. “We turned our backs on clan creepy because we didn’t want to die. Tricked Cinder, literally stole the keys, threw Watts under the bus—the better question is, why does it bother you?”

Because it was _Cinder_.

Emerald swallowed and tried another question in lieu of answering. “So where are we now?”

Nevermore eased off Cinder’s chest but kept a hand on her blade. “Out of the town Salem was about to level looking for her missing property,” she said, and from the dumbfounded expression on Mercury’s face, Emerald guessed he had no idea what she was talking about either.

But Nevermore had definitely used Salem’s name again.

“We were careful, Nev,” he said, more concerned with soothing his bruised ego than questioning how she knew about one of Remnant’s best kept secrets. “We covered our tracks, made sure no one would think to look for us for a few hours—”

“And used Salem’s own methods to escape her fortress,” Nevermore finished impatiently.

Yeah, there was a lot of unambiguous Salem knowledge getting tossed around all of a sudden, which Mercury still didn’t seem to be picking up on at all.

“It was the only way out—” he snapped.

“And it was something she’d be alerted about the moment it was used. Which, thanks to your brilliant ruse, this one,” Nevermore nudged Cinder, “didn’t think would be a problem. And when she realized what you did she thought she’d sit back and wait for rescue.”

The fury on Cinder’s face spoke volumes for how accurate that assessment was.

Oh.

“Luckily,” Nevermore continued, “that crisis has been temporarily averted and your friend wasn’t wrong when she called a crippled Fall Maiden your best bargaining chip. A bird in the hand and all that.” She took a deep breath and clapped her hands together. “So here’s how this is going to work: we are currently several days’ walk from the outskirts of Mistral. I will lead you there and lend you my sword for as long as it’s convenient for me, but all I really give a damn about is whether you manage to use that time to get Fall onboard with this little venture. If so, great, fine, enjoy your freedom and remember you owe me, because I promise you I will come to collect. If not, you become three horrifyingly detrimental liabilities I’ll be happy to relieve myself of when this is all over. Is that clear?”

Emerald and Mercury stared at her in stunned silence.

Cinder, still on the ground, had the biggest, most annoyed ‘I told you so’ expression Emerald had ever seen.

Okay, they’d definitely cruised into something unexpected here.

“Hi,” Emerald said, sheathing her weapons and waving a hand like she was back undercover at Beacon, “in case you need the reminder I’m Emerald, and I just have a few questions before we give you an answer, like, oh, why do you know so much about Salem, how do you know that the Maidens exist, and what kind of idiots do you think we’d be to take that deal?”

She whirled on Mercury. “Seriously, who is she that she already knows about all this?”

Mercury gave her a hilariously baffled deer-in-headlights expression that said, clearly, that he’d thought he’d known but actually had no idea at all.

Nevermore stepped to the side, still within reach of stopping Cinder, and spread her arms in a mockingly exaggerated ‘you tell me’ gesture. “How do you think I knew to turn the offer down?” she drawled. “You’re not the first people to get conned into that stupid war. Lucky for you, you’ve gone running to someone else who wanted out. But if you’re expecting a fair deal, we’re way beyond that after the hole you dug for yourselves.

“You’re on the run from literally the most dangerous being in Remnant, you’ve made enemies with her only opposition, and your heaviest hitter and apparent brains is a dying cripple looking for the earliest opportunity to go crawling back to Salem,” Nevermore continued, ticking the points off on her fingers. She huffed a derisive laugh. “In short, you’re screwed. I have nothing to lose by not helping you—pretty sure I’d be better off not to —but for better or worse the things you put in motion with Beacon have made me reassess a few things in my own life. Trust me, don’t trust me; that’s still your call, but no matter how shitty and one-sided this deal might be, I can guarantee you it’s the only offer anyone’s giving you.”

Nevermore’s speech was brutal, self-centered, and condescending as shit, and Emerald couldn’t find a word in it that wasn’t true.

So. Great. This was what rock bottom felt like. This right here.

Cinder leveled a glare at them that communicated just how many terrible consequences accepting Nevermore’s help would have.

“If you’re thinking about how you really didn’t think any of this through, I agree,” Nevermore said, audibly smirking beneath the mask.

Wow, fuck this lady.

Even if it was annoyingly, mortifyingly true.

“Swear you won’t sell us out to Salem,” Mercury said, just as Emerald blurted out, “Can you really help Cinder?”

“As of right now, I can’t see what I’d have to gain by doing it,” Nevermore said to Mercury, then turned to Emerald. “And...yes, probably, if you can get her to accept it.”

They exchanged an uneasy glance. Cinder was shaking her head violently at them, eye wide with horror.

It was a terrible deal. But at least they knew it was rotten from the start this time.

Emerald still couldn’t bring herself to accept aloud, glancing at Mercury with a resigned grimace. Mercury lifted his chin and met his godawful childhood whatever-the-fuck’s crimson eyes.

“So, what do you need us to do first?”


End file.
